Comments (11)

By admin, December 11, 2008 14:37

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It seems that Viewsonic has had a lot of problems with its manufacturing over the course of the last several years. The reviews from 2005/2006 indicate that Viewsonic was a premier supplier of flat panel displays.

Since it is well know that most of the actual displays are purchased from the few suppliers of such beasts, Viewsonic is responsible for building the hardware around the display.

Back in 2006 (you could see our article here) we bought two VX922 monitors and they worked fine until Sping of 2008. At that time we started experiencing problems with the monitor staying synced and displaying a picture, at least thats how it seemed.

At that time we started seeing one of our monitors (the one used the most) would simply black out, the green power light would go out, then the green light would come back on, the display would flicker and then both would go black again. It would simply keep cycling this process over and over.

I found that PLAYING with the power button would get the display to stabilize, sometimes smacking the monitor would get it to work. When I discovered this, I realized it was a manufacturing defect.

By the End of September I grew tired of the problem and decided to get it fixed. I contacted Viewsonic support at 1-888-688-6688, and reported the problem. I had troubleshooted it and confirmed it was the monitor. Having two monitors and two identical video cards and multiple PCs made this work fairly straight-forward. I was able to get everything to work except the monitor.

When I contacted Viewsonic on September 25th, they stated they would go ahead and REPLACE the unit. I would have to ship it to their repair depot (3rd party service company, Pro something solutions…) in Edmonton and they would advance a unit the same day.

First of all, they said they would same day replace the unit, and the Viewsonic representative confirmed this company had a unit in stock. They did not. The unit I shipped arrived September 26th, and they did not ship until the 3rd of October, so this was a blatant falsehood or an outright lie. If they gave proper instructions to the repair depot which is highly questionable at this point, the depot did not follow them. They also did not ship a replacement as promised. Regardless I did not really care, as long as I got a working monitor in return.

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Well I called on October 3rd to see what was going on and found out it shipped that day. I received my package on the 10th of October via CanPar. I was actually shocked to see this package, it was the EXACT SAME box I shipped on the 25th, very badly mangled and the bottom of the box was falling out. The driver even made a point in laughing about the packaging job. It turns out, they decided to FIX my monitor instead of replacing it, and then shipped it back on the day expected. This was NOT a replacement, nor SAME DAY service that VIEWSONIC told me I could expect.

We have a saying in customer service…under promise, over deliver. These guys WAY over promised and then did not bother nor CARE about the issue when I contacted them back about this.

When I opened the box there was light damage to the monitor, and the screen was scratched. I asked Viewsonic if a damage claim was made, and no such thing was done. I was shocked that a repair depot would be so careless and reckless sending fragile goods anywhere.

At this stage they decided to agree to advance replace the unit, but I had to send purchase details to them. Ok, so I did. I got two rejections that took until the 20th to clear up. On the 15th of October my second monitor started to fail. So now I call about this one. I asked VIEWSONIC to add this to the existing RMA, but they refused and instead decided to create a new one. Later I was told that this was the wrong procedure. Since I was dealing with two I had to make sure they had both in the system for processing. This took amazingly long for something that is fill a document and fax it back. They lost parts of the fax. Somehow they received page 1 but never received page 2. They blamed me for fax transmission problems, when I later discovered that faxes are emailed to the appropriate department, and they process them via email. Since they had page 1 but not 2 or 3 I could not understand how they messed this up, until I found out that they attach the faxes as TIF images, and multiple pages become a multiple part TIF. So the operator was careless and discarded it after reading the first page. Quite obvious now. Any apologies for this? No. So I again spend countless hours on the phone discussing this and faxing again, and confirming again.

So, after finalizing the details for the second I now have confirmations for the replacements and they are sent out. Within a few days I get the first one, the second one comes after about 4 days. Yes one was expedited, the other was ground. Wow, lovely. At any point we setup the replacements they work fine, seem to be ok, then we ship the old units back at the end of the week.

I was quite surprised to find two separate units, each a different shade of black and missing plugs for the back mounts. No big deal, I pilfered those from the originals and sent them back missing. But looking at two monitors side by side that were identical and now are not is a little bothersome. I certainly will keep them.

So by Nov 11th we finally had everything squared away. I have replacements and they have the originals. At this point I was hoping to never have to deal with Viewsonic again after this.

Well I was actually quite disappointed this morning while I was working I caught some flashing in the corner of my eye, and lo and behold, monitor #1 has started it\\\’s flickering again.

First call to Viewsonic, and I am not happy. I just got standard policy and careless responses to my questions. Stated they would only do a repair due to the age of purchase. I told her that was obviously wrong since I just had these items replaced by advance replacement not a month ago, so the age isn\’t a factor. I called this whole process incompetent and was left on ignore hold. I gave up after 15 minutes and called back.

Now, the monitor I had FIXED worked, but was damaged, the second monitor failed during the course of dealing with the first issue. If the first rep had said they would fix it and return it, I would have been ok with it THEN. If the repair depot had a good understanding of HOW TO PACKAGE GOODS FOR SHIPMENT, then I would not have had many issues and I would have been a happy client.

Instead, I had a new order (replacing 3 CRTS with LCDS) with my supplier, and had ordered the Viewsonics, since they were the best for the buck. After Oct 20th, I canceled the order and changed it to some really nice Samsungs (sorry do not have the models handy). I have had excellent service dealing with the local Samsung rep, the Viewsonic one never bothered to return my call back in 2004 when I was seeking vendors. I simply saw that two of the EXACT same monitors having the EXACT same problem could be a model or manufacturing defect. If its the latter then any Viewsonic monitor could fail at some point. I was not taking this chance.

So we called back, and now no amount of button pushing could get us to the english queue. Every button routed us to the spanish speaking operators. Finally someone spoke english, and transfered me to the english queue. This time I went back to RMA instead of tech support. Speaking to a lady who called herself Zorley (I hope I spelt that right) who was very attentive and listened and took notes about my issues. I am now awaiting a call back from a supervisor who will advise me what they want to do. I explained that this is an obvious issue and that Viewsonic must be aware of it, but there is no disclosure of the failure rate of these monitors. I would NOT buy a used one!!! Your buying a lemon if you do.

What DO YOU think Viewsonic should do in this case? I welcome your feedback on this concern.

Is my concern just me or a bigger problem?

Well here is a link to google with the search criteria I submitted to see if others have had this same problem. Search tags are: VIEWSONIC VX922 PROBLEM:

Massive number of results, try it and see.

The top five posts from that I included here:

http://www.fixya.com/support/p449204-viewsonic_vx922_19_monitor

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/247964-33-viewsonic-vx922-monitor-black-screen-green-power-light-flashes

http://www.swotti.com/monitors/viewsonic-vx922-19-lcd_14207_problems.htm

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/Monitor-Problems-ViewSonic-VX922-t181202.html

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/513718.html

So you can see, many folks from all over the planet are complaining about these monitors. My assumption is this is a very large manufacturing defect and is likely to affect other models. However since the exact nature has never been disclosed by Viewsonic it will not be possible without breaking NDA to find out the real details.

But this issue has completely put me out of the market when it comes to buying Viewsonic. I hope to later track down where they units where made, and find out what that firm builds besides Viewsonics. Since its likely going to affect many other monitors. But at this stage I can conclude the VX922 is a great gaming monitor until it fails. Then just chuck it in the garbage and buy a new monitor. (…chuck in the recycle bin…)

Should you buy another Viewsonic? I won’t be…ever, and I certainly will not recommend them to any client current or future. Since you all could be future clients I’m advising you not to. Also buy an extended warranty ONLY if it means you can avoid dealing directly with the manufacturer. I highly recommened this for any flat panel display simply due to the poor production value of these units.

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By Admin, May 21, 2007 17:09

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I recently took the challenge to try out the new Snort 3.0 alpha that Marty Roesch released upon the world. I was glad to see a new version of this tool available and was eager to see it work. I have had extensive use of snort over the years and can say I’m quite happy with the current 2.6.x.x builds. They are however very good working builds and are capable of doing what they’re configured for but they seem overly complex for the job at hand.

Honestly I can say that the instructions are very good at installing but like most people…who follows instructions? Don’t we all want to trailblaze?

I was at the time running Ubuntu 6.06 and getting ready to upgrade to 7.04 and decided to do the upgrade before I tried to build snort. I had a current 2.6.x build installed and also a 2.7.0.1 beta that were working. I removed the 2.6 build and left the 2.7 beta1 which managed to work with a bit of fixing.

After confirming this was fine and did a complete image backup of the computer. This ensures I can reload this image to disk and reboot the computer immediately. In fact I use disk partitions but I think you get the idea. This is my saving and backup method of choice. I use Restorer 2000 Pro Net to perform these tasks to a networked storage box. Restorer allows you to mount images also to partially restore or to test backups. Image backups can be quite handy let alone time saving.

Well I decide to pop in the 7.04 cd and start the upgrade process. What? No upgrade process? Cheap buggers, well I’ll just have to make my own. Using the Synaptic Package Manager, I run a full upgrade check and compare against the latestest versions on the CDROM. Then I force it to apply all upgrades.

This gets to about 25% of the way and then fatally errors with something I don’t recall. The system now boots but not completely and even though to some degree I can use it, really it’s not.

So, back to the drawing board I restore the original partition and decide to do the proper upgrade to 6.10. Well this worked very well. I was quite happy with myself so much I made another backup after successfully using my 6.10 installation. Then I went ahead and did the 7.04 upgrade. This worked also very well. Afterwards I found myself enjoying my new Ubuntu package I recalled that I was doing this for my snort alpha testing!

Back to work I get the snort alpha copied over to this box using wget, awesome. Unpacking the tar.gz I review the README to discover I need LUA and LIBDNET and UUID in addition to LIBPCAP. Well I have libpcap working fine as I have snort 2.7 working fine. Ok, so I need to get lua and libdnet (at this point) for sure since I’m pretty confident I have e2fsprogs installed fine (which was the recommended means to get the UUID stuff). I attempt to get the source for lua and compile it, but I get stupid errors with readline. I realize the *dev package doesn’t version match the readline package and as a consequence doesn’t want to compile nice and easy.

Cursing, I decide either I figure out how to get readline to compile or I find out how I revert back to an older libdnet/lua. Then I remembered that Marty mentioned that it worked with 6.10 so I figured this must have had a matching revision for these packages to their devel counterparts! So I went back to the 6.10 install and then tried the same thing. This was a better success, but still ended up encountering errors with libdnet. This was befuddling but this time the errors were specific to finding the files that ‘should’ be there. Guess what? They weren’t. I hadn’t installed the devel packages so I realized that I needed to actually ‘make’ these installs instead of using synaptic. While I was running around looking for the actual downloads, I realized the ’3rdparty’ directory that actually included both these tar files. Sure lets use these. First I did libdnet and it worked fine. Attempted to make snort again, and it still didn’t work, but this time I had no errors on libdnet. So I decided to go ahead and make lua from the snort package and then attempted to make snort. It got past lua and then found a new complaint.

This time it complained about UUID. In fact I did not have the UUID headers and again was dumbfounded over the missing headers. I did a quick google however and came up with a forum for some other product with a similar problem, and everyone complaining about having to download the entire e2fsprogs-devel package to get them. Someone then stated that the uuid-dev package would have them (for debian) and have been recently added to the 3rd party repo’s for this very reason. A quick ‘sudo apt-get install uuid-dev’ did the trick for me I’m quite happy to say.

After this I completed the make of snort and was able to quickly start testing it out.

It looks to have some very effective ways to process traffic, but have only finished the suggestions of the README. I’m curious to see how well it develops into a future version. Using LUA was a big concern for me, but really doesn’t seem to be causing any resounding concerns. I’ve become accustomed to it for now, but I’m not actually using it for development either. Hopefully I’ll update my experiments with it in short time.

For now Snort 3.0.0.a1.4 gets a thumbs up as a usable alpha program, now back to testing!

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By Admin, February 18, 2007 11:00

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In the latest of the current software we are ready to wrap up our final review of Internet Security packages from the major vendors.

We did not review Norton’s/Symantec’s or McAfee’s offerings due to the popularity of these items in the store and the fact that they are the most primitive and intrusive software install offerings in the market. Installing one of these packages in the past usually left us with a box we had to completely rebuild. We tested them out earlier in 2006 when they were available to beta testers and we decided not to bother. If you have used their older versions these are not that different nor better or improved.

To the topic we are discussing CA’s offering.

Computer Associates has a slogan that people have associated with it which says "The place good software goes to die". We certainly agree with this slogan. This company in 2005 bought our favorite firewall product Tiny firewall. This software has completely disappeared and now has been brought back to life in a ‘less filling’ option called CA Firewall. The ISS package comes complete with anti virus, anti spam, anti spyware, and firewall.
This package is one of the better offerings in this field only in the sense that the package is very intuitive to use and requires very little input from the user. If your users are not security savvy or like being dialogged by software to make decisions, then this package is it.

The anti virus offering is below par, but still decent enough to not miss any of our test patterns. The anti spyware is pestpatrol which is one of the better packages on the market and CA still offers access to its wonderful database of files. The anti spam is basic white/black lister so nothing special here, other than its clean and works well to protect you immediately. However its not complete alone so we would not recommend this product on its own, but with the ISS package features anti virus so it can also help prevent infection in addition to blocking. The firewall is very well done, but simply is missing very critical components that were part of Tiny Firewall. I assume that this is only being offered now with commercial products.

The real downside of this whole package is its lack of documentation, a feature comparison, its lack of instruction, its terrible help file and its just strange terminology.

Sure there isn’t much to set or change, but for experts who want more control this software is simply inadequate especially coming from Tiny’s excessively tweaky interface, your constantly feeling like you are missing things, and rightfully you are.

It doesn’t prevent anything like keyloggers from working or stealth dll intercepts or global hooks (except in a generic sense which doesn’t give enough detail to determine good or evil intent) so it’s still not going to deter any 0 day vulnerabilities but for the lightweight user or for your kids computer this is a competent package.
We give this a 6 out of 10, which if I’m not mistaken is the best rating we have given a ‘Integrated Security Solution’ ever.

Surprise to us that its from Computer Associates. Maybe this is a change to that old slogan but they are still paddling up the river with the same old boat. Good job guys, maybe next year we get a new boat to float in.

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By Admin, January 1, 2007 21:01

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Well continuing my review of ‘integrated security solutions’ I have once again become dismayed by the terrible offerings by the various security vendors out there.

Today we don’t have massive virus outbreaks, nor do we even have a big problem with Trojans (except when it comes to malware) and worms are even starting to slow down. We can thank enterprise scale solutions and active monitoring of networks for this. Yes, even email/spam solutions are stopping many of these things right at the server at our ISP, so very little should be getting into our machines today, unlike just a couple years ago when ISP’s were leaving each of us to our own solutions.

Today, malware in the form of ADWARE and SPYWARE, as well as BOTNETS and ROOTKITS are our big challenge, and in many of these that we encounter tend to not be detected in many products until they are discovered. In my mind this does not provide a solution but a clean up.

So I don’t recommend people who are pro-active to buy these ‘Internet Security’ solutions that the vendors are pumping. They are just no good and a waste of CPU time.

F-Secure’s offering is probably the worst I’ve encountered to date. But like many of these packages, they taunt you with a free trial offering, which seems to work pretty good.

F-Secure offers the same as every other package, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Firewall, as well as malware detection and a rudimentary rootkit check tool. Let’s start at the top.

The anti-virus solution is definitely the best of the inclusions with this product. When it updated that is. Our biggest challenge was getting this product to work through a proxy. Seems the F-Secure developers don’t comprehend proxies and the awesome solutions they provide, and many times our updates would never get downloaded. An Anti-Virus product is only as good as it’s updates, and we constantly had to fiddle with the settings to do a simple update. Pathetic. So we would just as soon use Avast for FREE which does not seem to have a problem with proxies.

The anti-spam solution was incredibly poor however causing several minutes of delays in processing email from nearly every ISP I tested this with. A normal POP session usually takes about 1 minute and about 10 seconds per email on the slow side. With F-Secure Anti-spam this increased ten fold. We were easily waiting about a minute per email, causing us to go for coffee every time we checked email. Since we use spam-assassin on our free servers and a very pricey solution for our Microsoft exchange server, we really don’t need anti-spam. It was no better at detecting the stuff that made it through these tools so it was simply wasting time.

The firewall was the worst of the bunch. First problem we encountered was one of our test boxes had NVideo Forceware Network Access Manager already installed. This is a firmware based firewall, and it works very well. The downside was that F-Secure Internet Security refused to install “anything” with this product installed. In this box we simply wanted to test the anti-virus and anti-spam solutions but we were forced to install the firewall product also. Trying to disable the firewall and reinstall NAM was ok, and thankfully NAM remembered are old settings saving us more time. Not F-Secure!

Once everyhting was installed in this box, we found out we could no longer access our network shares. Yes F-Secure firewall was blocking these accesses. Adding rules to allow this traffic made no difference. Isn’t a firewall made to configure what “I” want, not what some dork developer wants? I guess not. Nothing we could do (short of disabling the firewall) would allow us access to our network shares again.

The rootkit checker was bland. Featureless, did not detect 22 of our suspicious ADS streams and did not provide any output that could be used to track and discover where potential problems could be. The average person does not understand rootkits enough to be able to troubleshoot this without a lot of hand holding, and this tool has none of that available. Eeye’s BLINK was better for this yet even it was an ineffective tool at current rootkits. Old and very public rootkit technology was noted effectively, but most of the problems these days are botnet driven and none of these were detectable until infection occured and the OS was exploited. Then the anti-virus solution did it’s job.

The anti-malware portion of this software was very paranoid and kept advising us of tools that it didn’t think the average PC should have, like netcat or nmap, even PE builder tools were quarantined by F-Secure which annoyed me to no end. Sure one could build exceptions but shouldn’t the tool ask this during detection, not AFTERWARDS? Barts PE builder broke thanks to F-Secure’s gross paranoia. Perhaps they should devise a color coding like DHS has for terrorist alerts, ah never mind, they’d all be red…

The kicker was purchasing a license and getting technical support. I had to send two emails to get my license since they didn’t bother sending it automatically as part of the order. Very irritating to have to ask after a week of buying a license where it is.

The next kicker was contacting support about our two major issues. Updates and our firewall problems. Neither were addressed in a satisfactory manner. We were advised to disable proxies for updates. Ok, not a big deal but every week this needed to be changed since it seemed to forget the settings. As a consequence we were hardly up to date. This should be automatic and not require tweaking internet settings just to update so we fail this product on this point alone. The other components had very few updates (some never updated in the two months we used this product) so we wonder how effective a solution is if it is never updated. Snort rules for instance are updated almost every day, and they haven’t come close to detecting everything yet, so if I have a choice I’ll stick to a real IDS solution and not the ‘cleanup’ proposed by F-Secure.

Technical support was terrible also. Three phone calls to them and after explaining my problem to some fellow who speaks very poor English, he would offer to ‘email’ me a solution. I think he simply could not grasp the English alphabet over the phone when I tried to spell my email address since on all three occasions I never received an email from him. By phone call#4 I asked if he could simply walk me through this on the phone. He refused and insisted to email it. I then asked if he really was a technical support person? He said yes. I asked if he could REALLY help with my problem or if he didn’t have a clue how to fix my firewall/proxy solutions? He said he could. So I told him that I want him to help me now on the phone. He hesitates, but otherwise agreed..

F-Secure — you call that support? I call that very disappointing and disrespectful of your clients when you continually waste there time. Secondly, get people who can speak English. Make it a requirement of the job for those who prefer to get support in english.

After talking to this guy for about 20 minutes and following his instructions I was able to ‘one time’ update the package (I had to repeat his instructions every time I needed an update), but my firewall issue was not finding a solution. Even with rules in place (confirming I had indeed set them up correctly, but it still didn’t work) with the fellow from technical support still did not lead me to a working solution. I asked if there was a way to remove the firewall component completely. The tech stated I would have to download the Anti-virus program alone to accomplish this. I did not have a license for that product so I would have to buy another product to do this.

At this point I simply stated this product was ineffective and I requested a refund. This the tech support fellow was able to do very quickly, and in minutes I had a email in my inbox to confirm this.

This was the best performance I received from F-Secure.

My suggestion for you considering this ‘integrated solution’ Save your money and just buy the Anti-Virus product alone. IT’s the only thing worth any money, provided you don’t have any proxies to affect your updates.My suggestion was to stick with Avast anti-virus, which does most of this stuff for free and much more effectively.

My rating of this product is 1 out of 10. This should not even be out of beta, but getting a refund was no trouble.

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By Admin, September 4, 2006 13:40

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Like most folks these days I presume, you typically scan your computer either daily or weekly using a Anti-Virus program.  You also probably run cleanmgr.exe routinely to clean up your drives from junk and temp files.  You probably use some kind of firewall on the PC.  You probably also then use some kind of spyware product also.

I’ve become very disappointed with most spyware/adware products these days.  They are simply either ineffective or too paranoid.  Neither is an effective solution.  The industry leading Webroot is probably the most balanced on the market today, but it’s updating is making it ineffective when a outbreak occurs.  I for one will not buy a product that doesn’t effectively update its database constantly.  This is a big job and why I think it’s worth the money to spend on a solution, ONLY if it stays up to date. 

For a free solution you can always turn to SpyBot and Ad-aware SE.  Both these tools can be had for no cost stay ”reasonably” up to date, if not as current as some of the non-free products.  However every day one see’s a new product coming out claiming to be the latest and greatest. 

In order to get the most effective detection capabilities I think one needs to run the anti-spyware using a central repository that is constantly updated and does not require ”downloading” to update, or does so with the latest (built hourly) rules.

I have tried out Trend Micro Anti-Spyware Online Scan and will provide you with a step by step usage.

Using Trend Micro Online Scan

This is a very easy process.  The first thing you’ll obviously need is a PC connected to the Internet and to be running Internet Explorer v6.01 or greater to use the ActiveX component.

I tried it with Firefox using the ”IE Tab” extension, which worked fine, and also with the ”Open in IE” extension, which also worked fine.  Obviously the latter actually spawns IE, where the former simply opens a window within the firefox chrome.  If you don’t understand all this, don’t worry.  It works.

So, next you go to the link I provided above and allow the web site to install the ActiveX component which downloads the executable to perform the update and scan.

Once you get the executable running it will then update it’s rules from the repository at trend micro and start scanning.

Now we wait until it’s done.  The final result is noted by this screenshot we took:

From here we would have taken a very serious glance at the machine itself, if it wasn”t for the simple facts.

1.  This PC has Avast AV running, Scanned before detected nothing.
2.  This PC also has Tiny PF 2005 installed, and could not verify any infection directly or indirectly.
3.  We don’t know what it exactly found that was the problem.
So we take a closer look at the details that Trend Micro found, and this was the screenshot:


Taking a closer look would again give us indication that our box is owned.  But a few of these items are not a total surprise as far as the findings, the others are just lacking any real detail.
So we click on the ”Threat Details” link at the bottom for a select item such as this keyfinder.  Unfortunately the ”Detail” is rather pathetic.

As you can see for yourself this doesn’t tell us anything, and doesn’t confirm what we’ve found.  So I decide to submit these ”positives” to virus.com for testing against the worlds top AV programs.

First though, lets just double check it against our machines Avast AV:

Nothing. Well lets just make 100% sure.

As I was able to verify NONE OF THE ”POSITIVES DETECTED BY TREND MICRO ANTI-SPYWARE were legit.  Most of them in fact would have been cleaned and then rendered numerous software packages unusable.  The ONLY agreement with Trend Micro was noted in this screenshot below.  No other files were tested positive.

This is not an acceptable tool for any ”type” of detection and certainly not acceptable as a cleaner. 

I would not consider this tool to be ”beta” quality.  You are better off running NOTHING than this software.